Latest news with #J1601
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Giant Jets Bigger Than The Milky Way Seen Shooting From Black Hole
A supermassive black hole in the early Universe has been spotted blasting out powerful jets of plasma that are at least twice as long as the Milky Way is wide. Its host galaxy is a quasar called J1601+3102, and we're seeing it as it was less than 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. Spanning 215,000 light-years from end to end, this is the largest structure of its kind seen in those early stages of the Universe's formation, and astronomers think it can answer some questions about how they grow. "We were searching for quasars with strong radio jets in the early Universe, which helps us understand how and when the first jets are formed and how they impact the evolution of galaxies," explains astrophysicist Anniek Gloudemans of the National Science Foundation's NOIRLab. Jets are a particularly interesting supermassive black hole behavior. When there is enough material close to a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy, it swirls around, forming a disk of material that feeds into the black hole, drawn in by its extreme gravity. That feeding often produces a quasar, blazing with light as the swirling material is heated by friction and gravity to temperatures of millions of degrees. Not all the material falls onto the black hole beyond escape, though. Some of it gets diverted along the magnetic field lines outside the event horizon and accelerated to the black hole's poles, where it is launched into space with tremendous speed. These eruptions of material form jets, and they blast out into space for huge distances. The longest we've found to date are 23 million light-years from end to end, much later in the lifetime of the Universe. However, they only emit light in radio waves, which makes them a little tricky to see. To identify J1601+3102, Gloudemans and her colleagues had to combine observations from multiple telescopes, including the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) Telescope in Europe, Gemini North in Hawaii, and the optical Hobby-Eberly Telescope in Texas. These observations didn't just reveal the extent of J1601+3102's jets, they allowed the researchers to study the black hole. The amount of light emitted by the quasar activity can be analyzed to reveal the black hole's mass. It's just 450 million times the mass of the Sun, a relatively modest size for a quasar black hole. And it's not scarfing down matter at a particularly high rate, either. These properties suggest that quasars could be more varied than we generally assume. "Interestingly, the quasar powering this massive radio jet does not have an extreme black hole mass compared to other quasars," Gloudemans says. "This seems to indicate that you don't necessarily need an exceptionally massive black hole or accretion rate to generate such powerful jets in the early Universe." The discovery was detailed in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Humanity Has Just Glimpsed Part of The Sun We've Never Seen Before 'City-Killer' Asteroid Even More Likely to Hit The Moon in 2032 The Center of Our Universe Does Not Exist. A Physicist Explains Why.
Yahoo
09-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Astronomers found a monstrous jet powering through the early universe
Scientists have found a quasar spewing a gigantic radio jet in space at a time in the early universe when such objects are nearly impossible to find. Quasars, a portmanteau for "quasi-stellar objects," are blindingly bright galaxy cores. Through powerful telescopes, these distant objects can look like stars, but they're the resulting light from feasting supermassive black holes. The jet, sprawling at least 200,000 light-years, double the span of the Milky Way, emerges from the J1601+3102 quasar, born less than 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. Though a billion years later may not seem like the early days, that period occurred when the universe was only nine percent of its current age of 13.8 billion — making it a mere toddler. "It's only because this object is so extreme that we can observe it from Earth, even though it's really far away," said Anniek Gloudemans, a research fellow at the federally funded NOIRLab, in a statement. SEE ALSO: Scientists found a colossal black hole near the dawn of time The J1601+3102 quasar's radio jet was first discovered by the Low Frequency Array Telescope. Credit: LOFAR / DECaLS / DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys / LBNL / DOE / CTIO / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA Finding this radio jet, first discovered by the European Low Frequency Array Telescope, is an enormous achievement. Follow-up observations ensued in near-infrared light with the Gemini North Telescope and in visible light with Hobby Eberly Telescope. A research team has characterized the object in a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. These jets become elusive the farther back in time astronomers try to look because of the so-called cosmic microwave background. The ancient radiation, the earliest fossil of light from 380,000 years after the Big Bang, tends to swamp out more subtle signals. Although quasars are technically difficult to find in the early universe, the nearest quasars to Earth are still several hundred million light-years away. That quasars aren't found closer to home is a clue they are ancient relics. Scientists continue to hunt for them because they provide insight into the evolution of galaxies and the universe as a whole. Black holes in general are some of the most inscrutable things in space. Astronomers believe these invisible giants skulk at the center of virtually all galaxies. Falling into one is an automatic death sentence. Any cosmic stuff that wanders too close reaches a point of no return. But scientists have observed something weird at the edge of black holes' accretion disks, the rings of rapidly spinning material around the holes, like the swirl of water around a bathtub drain: A tiny amount of the material can suddenly get rerouted. When this happens, high-energy particles get flung outward as a pair of jets, blasting in opposite directions, though astronomers haven't quite figured out how they work. It's also still a mystery when exactly in cosmic history the universe started making them. Despite this jet's length, it's a pipsqueak compared to others scientists have discovered in later eras. Porphyrion, observed 6.3 billion years after the Big Bang, has a 23 million light-year-long jet. The J1601+3102 quasar is also of modest size, just 450 million times more massive than the sun. Quasars are sometimes known to tip scales at billions of times heavier than the sun. "Interestingly, the quasar powering this massive radio jet does not have an extreme black hole mass compared to other quasars," Gloudemans said. "This seems to indicate that you don't necessarily need an exceptionally massive black hole or accretion rate to generate such powerful jets in the early universe."
